Some Vintage Story mods
I have not installed any of these. I am just linking to them because they are fun/funny/interesting, and because looking at mods can tell you a lot about what a game's players are obsessed with.
If you are curious about what Vintage Story is - it's basically just Harder Minecraft. You can read about my time playing it here.
Nudity
This is a very simple mod that adds a "Nude" option to the underwear selection that is a blank texture, and therefore, removes the underwear entirely. The base game has graphics for a nude seraph, so this mod adds no other textures. Note that there are no details on said nude seraph - this is a safe for work mod.
People are so hungry for nudity in their game mods that they will make a safe for work nudity mod that just removes the underwear on the barbie doll character. Damn.
Unconscious
Mod that adds a new "unconscious" behavior for the player that is about to die. After getting into critically low hp that would kill you, now you will go into the state of being knocked out for 5* minutes. You can wait to bleed out.. finish yourself.. or be on a mercy of another player... but also! Someone can come in a shining armor and can pick you up if he decide to do so!
The mod seems to exist to allow more complex PVP behavior where players can execute or imprison one another. I think it's a great example of how players who want these kinds of experiences will describe them in a purely experiential way... it's pretty easy to imagine the kind of shared server dynamics that would emerge from a system where players can pick up, execute, or rescue one another, but you're never going to find that kind of summary on the mod itself. Instead, you're going to find the shining armor rescue fantasy!
Oregolems
This mod adds hostile golems that sustainably provide you with ores.They are living ore deposits ready to supply you with valuable resources. But be careful! These golems are not friendly and will defend themselves when attacked.
"Sustainably" in this context means "respawning." In games like Minecraft and Vintage Story, you can easily deplete your starter region of accessible mine resources. I think this ability to "mine out" (or otherwise deplete) your local area is a pretty essential part of most survival/construction games. You have to keep exploring, making new bases, moving your base, and so on. I think the resource stresses that force players to keep moving and building are part of why people play these games for so long in the first place.
But a lot of these mods are intended for shared servers, where an area can get quickly depleted by a LOT of players hanging out together. They also tend to like building huge structures together, ornamenting their houses, creating and then RPing in a village, and so on. So they've got a pretty legit need for endless resources to be delivered to them via some other mechanic (here, combat instead of exploration).
Fauna of the Stone Age: Casuariidae Plus
A collection of Cassowary and Emu from the Holocene.
This user has uploaded many mods which add various ice age species to the game - not only can you download this group of FIVE different cassowaries and emus, but you can also download a pack of mammoths/elephants, stone-age bovines, rhinos (multiple), penguins, horned tortoises, and "Moa and other New Zealand flightless birds." This modder also added a ton of additional stone age animal mods, and a bunch of mods which modify the plants and biomes of the game to be more realistic to actual regions from our real world's stone age. Find them all here. It's really tremendous work.
In Dappled Groves
"In Dappled Groves" is a mod dedicated to changing our relationship with one of the most important resources the world provides: wood. It starts by increasing the resistance of all the game's woods relative to their real-world hardness. This makes wood, in general, require time and effort to process.
This mod looks super popular and seems to add a lot of "more realistic" crafting mechanics which this game's players do enjoy. However I found those first few sentences of the mod description super fucking funny. "We know what you're looking for... a Minecraft which is not only harder, but which takes EVEN LONGER to punch a tree down!!"
Achievements
You guessed it - This mod adds achievements. Currently comes with 16 achievements, and contains a super easy API for other modders to add achievements!
A ton of the mods on the Vintage Story site are intended to make it easier to create a highly customized server experience. These achievements definitely seem to be something that would be useful for an RP server or customized map/adventure.
This kind of thing makes me wonder what devs would be better off just adding a lot of this stuff to server setup specs natively in their games. If you're going to have an achievement broadcast system inside your game which is separate from platform achievements on Steam or console, then having some super-simple server-message broadcast and achievement tracking system which is customizable by players on private servers seems like something people would go fucking nuts for. I wish more studios still cared about that kind of self-hosted server experience!
It's Called a Sconce
Renames the 'Brass torch holder' and 'Aged torch holder' to 'Brass sconce' and 'Aged sconce', respectively. That's it. That's the whole mod. It's called a sconce.
Bravo.
Coinage
Adds customizable coins and coinmaking tools to the game.
- Trussell and coin punches
- Small coining anvil
- Stumps of all types to hold your anvil
- 3 sizes of square and circle coins
- A bag to hoard coins in
- A manual coin press and a machine to turn it
By default everyone can make new coin designs, but you can also set it so that players require a specific privilege to be able to use the coin designer.
Another mod clearly meant to help set up an RP server. However I really enjoyed that the coin crafting system here is so "accurate". These mods really show you what this game's players care about, haha.
Vintage Story already comes with systems which allow the player to subtractively edit the major building blocks of the world using a voxel sculpting tool. I can't tell from this mod's screenshots but it looks like they used those systems to allow players to customize their own coin stamps. You could use this to put your face on your own coinage and disburse it from your own home, it seems.
The final thing I'd like to show you is the trailer on the front page of the Vintage Story website. It begins with the caption, "If you only do what is easy, your life will be hard." That says a lot about the type of player it is trying to attract, and the mods just support that - people who want a survival sim where it takes forever to do anything, and which they can mod to be even harder and more complicated and fiddly, if they so desire.
I like how this trailer just completely adopts the language that a player would use to talk about the player fantasy of playing this game. It feels like it's still speaking in the language of a Minecraft mod.
Anyway! I love looking at mod sites. They tell you so much about the things people are doing privately with their escapist fantasy. For Elder Scrolls games, there's one billion different nude mods; for Vintage Story, the nude mods are entirely dickless and the rest of the mods make tree wood harder. That's all you need to know.